Till Death Do Us Part
by Quietharm
Summary: It's all a matter of perspective. SessKag Oneshot.


In the end, they had both stood at the ancient roots of Goshinboku and stared into the twilight of their days together.

It wasn't as painful as Kagome believed it would be. In fact, she could describe herself as feeling quietly relieved if not numb to the fact of her last departure from the Feudal Era. The Shikon Shards had all been reunited with one another, making whole a jewel that had been Kagome's error from the beginning.

The wish had been made as well upon the Shikon no Tama.

The schoolgirl from the future had hugged Sango one last time, both of them crying softly. Shippo had wept as well when she knelt to scoop him up in a tight embrace. The houshi came next, and her uttered her name before giving her a quiet look. She even forgave him when they embraced and he goosed her.

Kiara received a hug as well, and after fighting back tears that threatened to fall down her face in fast rivulets, she turned to Inuyasha.

No, Inuyasha and _Kikyou_.

Kagome always wished for his happiness. She had always meant to preserve the happiness of others before her own. It seemed to compliment her function as a miko, but now she felt that it compounded it.

When the time for the wish came, Kagome had wished for Kikyou's return to mortality. True enough, it occurred and Inuyasha made his choice. Whether he made it for his own personal desires or to merely make whole the sacrifice she had brought upon herself, she couldn't be sure. In a way, she mused briefly over the idea that her selfless wish had been the last thing he had wanted - but to honor her for the great willpower and purity it had cost her, he accepted it.

He accepted Kikyou, and Kagome needed to return home to her own stilted life. Internally, she had laughed at her folly. This was her life, here. Her modern era had raised her to be the naïve teen that had fallen into the Bone Eater's well, and from there she had grown as a person. She learned love, jealously, friendship, anger, and even hate. The latter was her last lesson before she walked to the well and turned one last time to see the blurred images of her friends beyond the tears she could not hold back. Listlessly, she raised one hand and gave a half-hearted wave that was meant to show bravery. Instead, it gave proof to her inner cowardice in saying what she really felt all along towards him - towards Inuyasha.

She slung one leg over the lip of the cistern, biting her lower lip. It hurt to look upon him before she allowed herself to fall, but she couldn't save herself the trouble.

Pain. His countenance was that of raw anguish, even as he held Kikyou so very close.

Yes, from that time onward she learned to hate herself.

She let go and began her descent into the depths of the well.

------------

Falling far into fast-forward.

The girl from the past raised her gaze to Inuyasha's brother, who betrayed nothing. In all the havoc of the last month, she had been surprised to find him here, alive, at the foot of Goshinboku.

In times like these, she had chosen to be with her aging mother and teenaged brother. That last, fateful week was when all the students had been released from University - in fact, all students everywhere - to be with their families.

It was a shame, really. This was the opinion of her evening professor when she was informed of the crisis. Not much longer, their history professor broke down into sobs she worked hard to stifle before dismissing them all. It shook Kagome to the core, but not in the same way it had her peers.

Free. She would be _free_.

Her animated step was not spurred by inner turmoil and panic, but a new sense of purpose that she hadn't grasped for nigh on ten years. She fled the school, fled to her old shrine-home where she had been avoiding her ghosts. The young woman laughed like she hadn't in years and told them it wouldn't be long now.

Not long at all.

After going through the motions of goodbye's and I-love-you's with her mother and brother (her grandfather was now one of the ghosts; he already knew her true intent) she excused herself from the house to stand beneath Inuyasha's tree.

That's where she found him, seated at its base.

She studied him a precious moment, a moment they did not have to spare. Finally, she forced herself to speak. Her voice carried like the wind - faint, strong, fading - which was like so many other things, too.

"Do you regret much?"

The simple question was greeted with silence, initially. After a solid, squandered minute he spoke in a low octave that angered the woman of the present.

"I do not regret.."

She drew in a halting, fleeting breath of frustration. It could be her last.

"…much."

Time might have stood still were it possible, if one could will it to be so. He was the Lord of the Western Lands - or had been. Titles meant nothing when facing the brink. If she could stand on the precipice of all things known to man and see nothing below but a vast, ending void, then what was the point? Moreover, he could see it too. They both stood upon the edge of the chasm and gazed upon it with all its horror and dark promises meant to entice. They were there, and it was such a terrible reality that she prayed to blink out of existence _now_.

Of course, nothing happened just yet. Fate had also conspired against her when she left Inuyasha by the well with Kikyou in their world of sunlight and happy endings. That Kagome had jumped into the Bone Eater's Well that final time, and promptly died when she came out the other side into her own era. The new Kagome that had been birthed from the darkness of the well was hollow, a nothing girl who wandered her world without a will to go on. There was balance in all things, and where Kikyou had regained her humanity Kagome had lost her soul. She was nothing more than a second-coming of Kikyou, which fit since she _was_ the reincarnation of the resurrected miko.

Where one had got up, another had fallen. Irony was like that, and it treated her poorly.

It was with this knowledge that Kagome also realized that Sesshoumaru spoke the truth. A being like himself would not regret lightly, and never more than once. What he did regret would be an ever-bitter burn that would travel to all extremes of his mind, filling it with ash and dreams of _what-if_.

She thought of a small girl with dark eyes and imagined that her companion in the end times must be seeing them now in all their wonder.

"Rin.." she whispered, understanding. She sat beside him in the shadows as the ghosts chattered excitedly about them and the years leant their weight to both sets of shoulders.

More silence. On the horizon, a dark shadow was approaching. The comet had struck just as the astronomers had predicted a month prior, and all their efforts to deter it were in vain.

The tsunami engulfed the land and sky, blotting out the world and feeding from it. It was only a matter of time before they were consumed. For once, time was not something the ageless taiyoukai and the suicide with a heartbeat could waste. The reason for why he was there was not important, nor how he had survived to the present era and found her of all people on this last day in the world.

He was here, her last link to the past. Kagome felt reborn and _alive_.

"Can I hold your hand?" she suddenly asked, her tenor breathless and engrossed by the ambulatory penumbra that swallowed the heavens whole.

He did not answer, and she did not expect him to. Ignoring this trifle, she deftly extended her closest arm and threaded her fingers through his clawed digits.

Her hands trembled with eagerness. She squeezed his hand, just to feel blood and bone one last time.

Nearly beyond her belief, she felt an answering pressure. It wouldn't be long now. The din from their savior drowned out all things, including sound.

Reason escaping the dead girl, she lifted her head once more to rest her cloudy blue eyes on Sesshoumaru. Her vision was clear. Was he tired and alone, too? Above the cacophony, she raised her voice one last time - but she could no longer hear herself as seawater struck her face like small slaps and her hair whipped around her neck like a loose noose.

Her lips and tongue rotated around her utterances, and whether or not the demon beside her could hear her despite his heightened auditory abilities she could not know.

"We'll be with them soon!"

He gave her a sharp look. His slit pupils reflected the last of the fading red light, and shone briefly in the roaring dusk. He looked like a predator staring out from the blackness of things, eyes flashing before that lethal jump.

As was his way, he turned his head to face his opponent with a determined glare. The difference, Kagome noted with awe, was the set of his grim yet _expectant_ smirk.

The pressure was building somewhere in her head as she was assaulted with debris. The world around her shook, and water was everywhere. She tipped her chin up, and tried to imagine seeing the crest of the tsunami as it hovered impossibly high over their heads. There was a peak time in all things, and that time for the miko and demon had long since past. They had lived boneless in the wake for so long - he for centuries and she for a decade. By their own methods of counting, it had been eternity without reprieve.

The last thing Kagome felt was the sensation of his hand in hers. The feeling did not linger, it merely flickered in less than an instance through her nerves before there was a blessed lack of sentience and sound.

In life, in the golden years of a once-upon-a-time, they had been adversaries. Now, in death, they were united.

In the end, they had both stood at the ancient roots of Goshinboku and stared into the twilight of their days together.

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A/N: I don't know where this came from. It just popped into my mind at work today and I got home and just wrote the entire thing like an LSD fiend. Anyways, I hope it wasn't too weird. It makes sense, in a psychotic way.


End file.
